One thing you can’t say about Cinque Terre these days is
that it’s off the beaten track but that doesn’t mean it’s not an astonishingly
beautiful part of the world.
For the uninitiated, Cinque Terre is a set of five villages
on the North West coast of Italy, from south to north, Riomaggiori, Manarolo,
Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso. These are tiny villages with maybe as many
as 2000 residents each nestled into incredibly steep valleys hard against the ocean
and with dry stone terrace gardens, some of which predate the pyramids covering
the 450m high hills. These terraces have traditionally been used for household
and small scale trading gardens mostly planted with fruit, citrus, veggies,
olives and grapes.
These villages are steeped in the traditions of the small
town – everyone knows everyone, people sit on park benches until late into the
evening talking and laughing and most of all, they move at a slower pace of
life.
When fumbling for some change at a little supermarket and
trying to hurry so as to not hold up the person behind me, the shop keeper kept
saying calma, calma and making the universal gesture for ‘take your time’ or
‘whats the rush?’. Wonderful.
I do wonder, though, if that way of life is at risk from the
tourism that’s flooding the area. It seems like everyone we spoke to had been
to Cinque Terre or had a close family member who had been there. Many of these
terraced gardens near the villages have clearly been abandoned in the last few
years and are now completely overgrown with blackberries and ivy. When walking
through the mountains (ok, hills but they felt like mountains) between
villages, we saw more terraces that had been abandoned (judging by the trees
growing in them) more like 20 – 50 years ago.
Its quite sad in a way to see these ancient dry stone walls
and terraces that have been built with care, skill and effort (and I suspect a
lot of collaboration between residents of the village) being progressively
reclaimed by the bush. Most of the walls are still standing, they have just
been overgrown. What was carefully tended garden is now regrowth forest.
There is also a message there about the inherent frailty of
the constructions of the human edifice. The things we build, just like us,
eventually get reclaimed by the land. While we have a large program of works
for our own garden, including the construction of terraces, walls and
productive plantings, which we will build with skill, care and effort, one day
someone will drive a bulldozer through it. The lasting difference that garden
makes will be in how it improves our life and how we can spread that difference
and the message of the things that matter to us to other people. In short, the
lasting changes to the world come not just from the things we build (and even
less the things we tear down) but in how we improve the lives of other people.
I suspect the challenges facing agriculture are universal –
in the modern world of technology and instant gratification it is hard to get
young people interested in working in agriculture. With modern transport
infrastructure, growing produce locally isn’t necessary (I still think it’s
good for other reasons though) and the enormous physical effort involved in
working these terraces makes it uncompetitive for locals to grow produce in
these hills, carry it on their backs (300 vertical meters or more) down the
incredibly steep paths, to the village for sale at the market.
I also wonder if the tourist trade is pushing land, housing
and retail prices up making it increasingly difficult for people who are not in
the tourist trade to survive living the traditional lifestyle there.
I don’t think this is happening to all the villages at the
same rate. Corniglia is the least accessible of the five villages. The ferry
that runs between the villages can’t stop at Corniglia and the train stops in
the next valley. Unlike Vernazza and Riomaggiori, you don’t walk through a
tunnel to get from the village to the train station, you walk up the (you
guessed it) really steep hill. Twenty flights of stairs does seem to act as a
barrier to the tourist trade. Because of this, I think Corniglia has the most
traditional lifestyle of the 5 Terre but even then, you can see the difference
between the new, young or tourist oriented residents and the older, traditional
locals.
The local people and different tiers of government and
regional management are working to preserve the way of life of the villages in
spite of the pressures of international tourism. Posters in each town talk
about the cultural value of farming and wine production to the local area. Most
of the wine sold in the shops was local, which is great, but there are only a
handful of different wineries.
I recognise that many traditional things are left behind for
the better, trains instead of carts, communication technology, sanitation, food
availability etc. all make our lives more secure, safe healthy and enjoyable;
but as I sit here with my glass of local wine and slice of focaccia, watching
the sunset over the ocean for the third day in a row I find myself hoping that
society as a whole does not let these advantages strangle the old pleasures,
lifestyles and professions in favour in favour of the new.
